


The Fall of Aldmeris

by Falconier111



Category: Elder Scrolls
Genre: Aldmeris, Alternate Universe - Pre-Canon, Altmer - Freeform, Dawn Era, Elder Scrolls Lore, F/F, Goblins, I guess it could be both, Merethic Era, Necromancy, Nirn, Pre-Canon, Sload, Summerset Isles, What Did I Just Write, grievous use of headcanons, long-winded explanations of elder scrolls lore, non-standard space-time
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-09-21
Updated: 2018-09-24
Packaged: 2019-07-10 22:18:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 6
Words: 5,473
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15958706
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Falconier111/pseuds/Falconier111
Summary: Before there was a Tamriel, there was another civilization. This is how it died.Includes Lore Primers explaining the obscure and often confusing history of the creation of Tamriel.





	1. Lore Primer: Aldmeris

CANONICAL: the gods did not create Nirn (the world The Elder Scrolls takes place in) from nothing; instead, on the advice of the trickster god Lorkhan, they tore apart no less than 12 pre-existing planets and assembled it from them. Unfortunately, Lorkhan tricked them or messed up the project somehow and shit went south, leaving the newly-created world unstable and dangerous. One of those worlds was inhabited by the Ehlnofey, the ancestors of most of the races of Tamriel: one chunk of that homeworld, Aldmeris or Old Ehlnofey, made it over intact and its inhabitants became the Aldmer, the ancestors of the elves. Everybody else that made it over got nicknamed the Wandering Ehlnofey and eventually became humans.

The two sides fought over Aldmeris for an indeterminate amount of time (space-time wasn’t exactly solid back then) before the Wanderers won and drove the Aldmer out, after which they fled to the Summerset Isles and eventually developed into the elves you see in TES. Nobody knows where Aldmeris went; there’s some reason to believe that it never existed. The humans that show up in the game came from various other continents in the game world that probably weren’t it either. Not everybody around is a human or elf though; the fan base speculates that the Hist (sentient trees associated with the Argonians, one shows up in Oblivion) and the Dreugh (watery octopus-people/douchebags you fight in Daggerfall and Morrowind) may have come from other worlds that predate Nirn, while others like the goblins and maybe the Khajiit may have evolved naturally.

IN THIS FIC: while canon lore implies Aldmeris was technologically advanced (in-game sources describe it as being entirely artificial except for the Aldmer), it definitely was, though high-tech means something a little different in this cosmos than what we're used to. Also, lots of other chunks of Nirn came from other planets; the Summerset Isles, for instance, came from the homeworld of the goblins and Sload. This will become an issue.

Also, a kilosecond is a bit over 15 minutes and a megasecond is about 11 days; they don’t use minutes/hours/days because their time system predates the existence of the sun. The “ subjective” part will be explained in the next Lore Primer.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Removed the first chapter because it was garbage. The chapter index must look bizarre now.


	2. Landing

She woke some time later, the hateful hole Magnus the Architect tore through the void shining in her eyes to spite her. With a faint groan and a quick, fruitless search for her helmet to shield her eyes with, she struggled back into consciousness and sat up, consciously ignoring the bodies on the deck, living or dead, and seeking out work to distract her mind with. Fortunately for her sanity she soon spotted the mages manning the sails as the last few began dropping into unconsciousness, trudging her way over to their stations and hooking her arm under one of them. Shaking him occasionally to keep him awake, she lent her own not considerable magickal talents to compelling the ship’s sales towards the fragment of another world, one Aldmeri scouts had recently spotted and their elders had designated as the refugee fleet’s meeting point; by now, without a pilot to direct the boat (he’d died in the escape), they were likely off-course, but as long as they found the island – any part of it – they might live.

As the first mages to pass out stirred from their exhausted sleep, one approached Aloen and recoiled. She stared at him blankly when he babbled something about her armor, still speckled with vomit from the night before, then stripped it off without breaking eye contact; his words slowed until, flushing, he shut his mouth and helped fill the sails. It was quiet, she noticed as she turned away. She had forgotten what it sounded like. Not true silence, the complete absence of sound; she’d heard that well enough stalking Wanderers through abandoned districts. But the soul-grating sounds she’d grown used to over subjective centuries of war had vanished; fire licking at buildstone, the boom of magic in the distance, shouted commands and forlorn weeping, all replaced by the sound of waves and wind. Even the groans of the wounded were gone, after their healers, replenished by subjective dozens of kiloseconds of rest, tapped into the fluid nature of time to reverse their injuries.

It was like being in a new world. In a manner of speaking, she supposed, it was.

The hole in the sky had reached its apex by the time one of their number spotted land. The rest of the passengers, now mostly awake after dozens of subjective kiloseconds, let out a muted cheer without enough energy for more. The scout also reported no sign of other Aldmer, to no response. Avoiding the obvious landing site to the north – residual paranoia from avoiding Wanderer raiders – instead the ship mages guided them into an inlet a bit to the south, running them aground on a sizable island near the shore. The survivors groggily spilled out onto the beach.

Confronted with a situation she had no orders for, Aloen defaulted to her training and headed belowdecks to consult with Commander Abranus, only to find him near-comatose in his bed, staring blankly at the wall of his tiny cabin. She’d half-suspected he’d overused his battle-trance spells, their inevitable backfire placing him in a more extreme version of the insensate state of mind that allowed former civilians to face brutal combat. Gently closing his eyes to prevent them from drying out even further, she left the cabin, closed his door, and headed up to direct the construction of their refugee camp.

To Aldmer used to the stone and glass of their homeland, this new land was overwhelmingly lush, almost hallucinatory. Half the refugees jumped every time a bird chirped or animal called, setting the rest on edge through the never-ending symphony. Confronted with trees and bushes, thick beyond anything the Earthbones had attempted to grow on Aldmeris, those assigned to clear a space struggled mightily to haul even small amounts of foliage aside. Abuse of timeline-reversal, necessary to bring injured or near-dead Aldmer back from the brink of destruction, left both healer and healee sluggish and clumsy, stretching tasks that should have taken subjective seconds to decaseconds of out-of-sync movement, near-misses, and faulty perceptions that accompanied warped space time distorting the light and sound passing through it.

After the fourth laborer lodged her axe in a tree when her timeline skipped a split-second, Aloen fished Thalmon (still temporally synced, his near-fatal wound dealt so fast a healer could reverse and heal him in subjective seconds) out of the work gang he’d been directing breaking down the ship for raw materials. Halfway up the beach to the ledge she’d called out to him from, Thalmon stumbled to a halt and started laughing at her, making his obligatory insults. In better times, she’d have pulled on the old-style poetic wit she’d taught for subjective megaseconds in her former school to weave elaborate, personalized insults casting aspersions on his character and achievements, but instead –

“I would correlate your pathetic height to your penis size and your limp to your performance in bed, but the spark of my care for you has long since guttered out in the face of your sad insubordination” slipped out. Her composition teacher would have paled and shaken his head.

Thalmon laughed again. Muttering something about pretension under his breath, Thalmon finished his walk and listened as she issued orders to direct land clearance, scouting, and resource gathering while she handled construction and work and supply distribution. Back on task, with a little bit of light still sparkling in his eyes, he saluted smartly and marched inland.

The work was hard, but their desperation and determination were harder, and by the time Magnus’s hole approached the horizon, casting its trademark otherworldly light over their nascent settlement, the refugees had erected enough lean-tos and huts from felled trees and scavenged timber to safely house everyone for the night. Without the heating systems that permeated even collapsing Aldmeris many survivors already clumped together for warmth, hiding in their meager shelters from a cold and alien world.

Aloen, now by default the refugees’ leader, hauled Abranus into her hut and set him down on her designated blanket, forcing some pale broth between his lips in the hopes that he’d somehow survive long enough to emerge from his battle-trance coma. Setting aside her soup bowl, she crouched on the cool sand beneath her, wrapped the cloak she’d appropriated from a mouthy civilian around her, and stared through her open door at the sea in the rough direction of Aldmeris. The last light gave way to the sparkling of the stars when something shook and shifted in reality around her, snapping her mind into sharp focus before knocking her unconscious.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Added Lore Primers to make this thing slightly less inscrutable.
> 
> Post a second chapter? Why would I continue this monstrosity? Let alone take it seriously enough to explain things.


	3. Lore Primer: The Dawn Era

CANONICAL: the period between the gods starting and finishing the construction of Nirn is called the Dawn Age or Dawn Era. At this point reality was fluid and confusing, not really comprehensible to modern mortals. While time existed, it was purely subjective, with cause and effect not strictly aligned and events occurring in different orders for different people. This instability, along with the unfinished nature of reality in general, ended up straight-up killing many gods and powerful spirits as the fabric of reality damaged them; among other effects, the sun and the stars were made at this time by Magnus (the god of magic and the guy who basically drew up the blueprints for reality) and the Magna Ge (his attendance spirits) respectively telling reality to go fuck itself and fleeing it so hard they punched holes through reality that let light in from the realm of magic. At some point in this period, after on top of everything else the Dawn War (the formal name of what happened in the last primer) broke out and got a lot of people killed, the gods convened and executed Lorkhan for his crimes before Akatosh (at this point often known by his Elven name, Auriel) imposed linear time on reality.

Though the Dawn Era is long over, occasionally something stresses time so badly that it temporarily shatters; during these Dragon Breaks (which get their name from Akatosh, the Dragon God of Time, being stretched to the breaking point) weird shit tends to go down, like over a thousand years passing in ten or people giving birth to their grandparents or pillars of fire creating neat administrative units by burning borders into the ground, killing everything there. While how they work is a story for another primer, one of their key elements is the temporary breakage of linear time; scholars in and out of game, therefore, view them as temporary reversions to the Dawn Era. Read the text of _Where Were You When the Dragon Broke_ on UESP (or just Google it) to get a better idea of what Dragon Breaks – and the Dawn Era – looked like.

IN THIS FIC: time proceeded in a more-or-less linear fashion as a rule, with cause and effect usually lining up and events generally happening in the same order, but the timelines of individual people and objects were disconnected and could be shifted around at will. That’s what “subjective (x)seconds” means whenever I break it out; people’s timelines moved at slightly different rates and could be reversed with some effort. But, it wasn’t just time that was fluid; it was space, too. In the heart of the Dawn Era, while distances, dimensions, and spaces were largely consistent, they weren’t exclusive and a conscious being could mess with them at will. At this point in history (as much as that term applies here), you could walk a thousand miles to work every morning by focusing on where you wanted to be; or two people could sit in the same chair at the same time, eat the same meal, and both be nourished; or an infinite number of people could live in the same house comfortably as long as they managed their utilities right. As long as they lived in this environment, all the Ehlnofey that survived the destruction of their homeworld managed to muddle along.

However, the gods figured that this spatial/temporal instability would eventually tear Nirn apart (and also kill them), so they embarked on a process of solidifying it. Unfortunately, this led to chaos in Aldmeris as space and supplies became an issue and kicked off the Dawn War. It took a while for the gods to wrap it up: as of this chapter, time was fluid enough for people to mess with their timelines (like reversing injuries by rewinding them), but too much time manipulation would send their timelines out of whack; likewise, the mages driving the refugee ship account on getting themselves to their rough destination by willing it, no matter what storms or currents delayed or redirected them, but they couldn’t just jump there like they could’ve earlier on.


	4. Preparing

Aloen woke up into an alien world. Even before she opened her eyes she could feel it: a sense of solidity and lack of motion that made her flesh crawl. It took her several moments to pin down its source; her timeline wasn’t fluid. She’d spent most of her life on a Nirn without a temporal anchor, a planet where time and space were fluid enough to overlap and allow multiple people to safely occupy the same space and where the refugees from dead worlds could – just barely – coexist. Then Auriel announced that instability would rip apart the world in time and drove his Adamantine Tower through northwestern Aldmeris, binding space, time, and Mundus together and dooming the two branches of the Ehlnofey to war over the space and resources left.

But this was different. She couldn’t feel her timeline stretching before and after the present or the sense of direction that came from controlling her immediate location. Even as she considered this change, the words to describe her prior existence slipped away. She spent maybe a kilosecond (not subjective anymore) wrestling with reality before she gave up.

When she opened her eyes and stood up, she saw walls of sheet-metal and a thick door instead of the wood of her humble hut. Instead of her cloak and filthy armor, she now wore a set of military under-armor padding with the insignia of the captain sewn into its shoulders (curious, since she’d been a brevet sergeant she checked); on a rickety metal nightstand by the standard issue cot she’d stood up from lay a belt, dagger, what looked like an identification card, and the rest of the kit the Aldmeris military issued to mid-ranking officers. Taking the hint, she buckled on the belt and pushed the door open.

The hallway teemed with the activity of a military base mid-campaign. Most passersby were the expected Aldmer administrative aids and soldiers in uniforms of varying degrees of rattiness, but Aloen nearly drew her dagger when she saw a Wanderer run down the hallway, the pale Atamor teetering under half his already prodigious height of boxes. She seemed to be the only one in the hallway to spare him a second glance, though, and she took her hand off the grip before he vanished around the corner. More common than him and the one or two other Wanderers she spotted passing through were members of a race unfamiliar to her. Hunched over and green-skinned, arms longer than their legs hanging past their simple tunics as they strode confidently through the hallway. One spotted her rank markings and trotted over to her, snapping off a startlingly smart salute considering the length of its arms.

It gargled something, before an amulet around its throat lit up and spoke directly into her head in tinny, slightly accented Ehlnofex. “You must have just woken up, Captain. General Tarredayn ordered all officers on-base between the ranks of Lieutenant and Major to report to Briefing Hall 7B as soon as possible half an hour ago.” As she blinked at the unfamiliar unit of time (the amulet mentally clarified “half an hour” as equivalent to 1.8 kiloseconds), it continued, “you should have some leeway since it looks like you were one of the stragglers caught in the open at the end of the Convention, but I advise that you proceed to the briefing hall as soon as possible. Also,” it pointed at a pouch on her belt, “I suggest you put on your translation amulet.” Aloen slipped the amulet over her neck as the creature gave her directions with terse words and fluid gestures, making sure to thank it when it finished; her amulet gargled in response and it acknowledged her thanks with, of all things, an elaborate bow before stomping off.

Briefing Hall 7B took another kilosecond (about 15 minutes according to the amulet) to fill up after she arrived. Through chatting with the several dozen soldiers already there, Aloen learned a bit about her situation. Her ship had indeed been the last to leave Aldmeris; the three or four remaining Aldmer communities there had refused to emigrate and were presumed dead, the rest (and a few Wanderer defectors) having fled. This base was one of the half-dozen scattered around the island they’d landed on, which was called Aurindon by the locals; those locals, the green, lanky “goblins” she’d seen traveling around the base, had made common cause with the Aldmer against a rival species called the Sload (and if they were to be believed, the Sload were worth killing off). Aloen had been just about to make inroads into the numbers involved when one last particularly tall and lanky goblin walked in, shortly followed by an Aldmer officer in full (if worn) dress gear. The goblin shouldered their way into the seat next to her as in the general walked to the front of the room.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, “welcome to the new Joint Army, Eighth Division, assigned to the Central Aurindon front. Many of you were until recently charged with defending groups of refugees and must be prepared for our military’s next steps. As such, your next two weeks here will be spent retraining you for combat. Before we can begin, however, we have two things to cover.”

He took a deep breath and straightened up further. “Approximately 220 kiloseconds ago,” Aloen heard mumbles as translation amulets converted kiloseconds to 2.6 days in goblin time, “the Convention concluded.” Several Aldmer and Wanderers shifted in their seats. Aloen leaned forward, listening intently. “The gods have found Lorkhan culpable for the flaws in Nirn’s construction. As punishment, they ordered his execution.” Those shifting in the audience fell still. “However, they also decided to preserve Nirn, and they have taken measures to make its existence permanent.

“Around 200 kiloseconds ago they took action on the subject. The details are unclear, but as of now the flexibility of existence we are all used to no longer exists. No individual known to us can fight, heal, or navigate using certain methods that date back to our mutual arrival in this world. A few of you” his gaze passed over several audience members, including Aloen, “were caught off guard by this transition and put into temporary comas by the shift in reality. Those we let sleep until shortly before this meeting in the hopes that they’d acclimate better to the change after their bodies had time to adjust.”

Aloen instinctively reached out for her timeline. Nothing.

“That brings me to my second point. Though we have lost much of our fighting strength while we retrain our soldiers, the demands on our military remain constant. At present the Joint Army fights to protect Aldmer and goblin refugees alike from the Sload, whose crimes beggar description. Many of you are familiar with their ravages; the rest of you will soon become acquainted. Every other thinking being on these islands is at risk as long as Sload necromancers and sorcerers hold territory here.”

“We are the last division assembled to fight this war; after this, we lack the manpower to do anything more than reinforce the standing army. Each individual in this room, and in this division, represents our combined civilizations’ greatest hope for survival; we must bring victory to every front we arrive at, or our forces there will fall and bring doom to everyone we care about,

“Most of us here have little experience fighting together and all of us lack experience with the new nature of physical combat. This is unfortunate,” Aloen and her goblin neighbor both snorted, then turned and gave each other a sly smile, “and it is also irrelevant. Failure means destruction; success mean survival. In the coming days I expect each and every one of you to push yourselves beyond the limits of your endurance, even if it means your death. If you die well, we will all live long enough to honor your memory.

“Before we proceed to retraining, do you have any questions?”

Being good soldiers, no one spoke up.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I guess this is the thing now. Let's see how long it lasts! (not long)
> 
> Unless anyone says differently, I'll upload the Lore Primers after posting the main chapters to keep updates going up as soon as possible.


	5. Lore Primer: Convention and the Towers

CANONICAL: the Convention, sometimes just called Convention, was one of the last big events of the Dawn. The gods gathered around at Adamantine Tower in modern High Rock – which you may know if you’ve played Daggerfall and you should know about it because it’s _Akatosh’s fucking spaceship he rammed into Nirn to hold it together_ (no, seriously) – to deliberate on what to do to Lorkhan for tricking them into making Mundus (the word for the solar system/reality around Nirn). Ultimately Trinimac killed him and Auriel took his indestructible heart and shot it into the sky with his bow (the one that shows up in Dawnguard); it landed in Morrowind where it raised Red Mountain at its landing spot. This act suffused Lorkhan’s divine power throughout Mundus and stabilize it enough for the gods to head for greener pastures.

Adamantine Tower and Red Mountain were the first of a series of capital-T Towers, weird-ass physical/metaphysical constructions that keep Nirn from collapsing into nothing. The details of what they are and how they work – called in and out of game Tower Lore – are famously complex and incomprehensible, but the upshot here is that, since Mundus isn’t stable enough to exist on its own, if all the Towers fall, so does Mundus.

IN THIS FIC: imagine a sheet of paper on a hard surface. You can move the paper over the surface freely, turning it, sliding it, even lifting it up and putting it back down without causing it any damage. However, you can crumple it, tear it, or accidentally slide it off the surface, or the wind might carry it away.

Now imagine the sheet of paper with a thumbtack in it. Now it’s attached to the surface and can’t move around as much, but it still has some freedom of movement: you can rotate it around the thumbtack or lift it up by the corners. But too much rotation or lifting will tear the paper around the thumbtack or rip off its corners, leaving it damaged and more likely to come off.

Add another thumbtack. Now the paper is fixed in place. You can no longer rotate or slide or lift it (unless the thumbtacks are in the same corner, for the last one), but it’s much less likely that anything will damage it. Even if someone does tear away at a corner, the two thumbtacks will keep much of it in place. Every new thumbtack you add won’t make a huge difference after that, but each one holds another corner of the paper down.

This is how Towers work.

As for Convention… That’s not exactly what happened.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Split Lore Primers into separate chapters for easier reading. So there.
> 
> If you like, please leave a kudos or comment. I'm shooting for one kudos by the end of September. Arrogant, I know.


	6. Storming

TWO DAYS LATER

A wooden sword at the ready, Aloen crouched in a traditional fencer’s stance and stepped to the left. Muluc, her Goblin friend from the briefing, barely reacted, maintaining her characteristic hunch and loosely grasping their dulled hatchet in their hand. Seconds passed as shouts and thuds from other sparring soldiers filled the room. She stared her partner down, waiting for an opening they just wouldn’t give.

Aloen feinted to the right to no response. A more daring feint in front of her – still no response. She shifted forward, deliberately missed with her thrust to provoke a reaction, and only barely dodged their hatchet as it slashed towards her midriff. Now wary of her partner’s far longer reach, Aloen withdrew several steps and sunk back into her neutral stance.

Muluc moved next. Stepping slowly forward, their body almost bouncing with every step in the Goblins' peculiar stride, they waited for Aloen to take a step backward to strike. Spotting the incoming hatchet long before it landed, Aloen casually knocked it aside and riposted – only for Muluc’s off-hand to slam into her stomach, nearly winding her. She barely dodged the follow-up swing before stumbling back far enough to raise her guard again.

“Two points!” bellowed their trainer, a grizzled Aldmer veteran who’d recognized Aloen’s school-taught stance and instantly developed a dislike. “All’s fair in war, soldier. If you want to relearn how to fight, you’ll need to fight dirty.”

Suitably chastened (and more than a little embarrassed), Aloen went back at the ready. Muluc smirked a bit and Aloen scowled back. Then she schooled her features and took two steps forward. Just slowly enough to telegraph her movements, she raised her sword towards their right side and Muluc moved their hatchet block. Before their weapons met Aloen pulled on her magicka to shoot a bright light into their eyes; her opponent temporarily blinded, she rapped them so hard on their arm they nearly dropped their hatchet.

“One point!” the trainer said. “You will be fighting the dead, light won’t distract them and severed arms won’t stop them. Good tactic, though,” he admitted grudgingly.

Now Aloen smirked at Muluc. They pouted in response. The expression looked so comical on the Goblin’s face that she laughed. In response their face sagged even further, provoking more laughter. Their hatchet whipped around into her chest hard enough to crack her ribs.

“Three points!” he exclaimed. “Quick thinking, Muluc. Aloen, you can’t rely on battle-trances to suppress your emotions while we’re running low on casters, focus! You’re coughing blood. Round over, match to Muluc. Healers!”

Aloen sunk to her knees, dropping her sword to clutch at her side. Instantly Muluc set down their weapon and kneeled next to her, frowning in concern. As the healers lay their hands on her, still inexperienced in healing with magicka instead of timeline-reversal, she gave them a pained grin.

“Better luck next time,” she said. Muluc returned her smile.

 

TWO WEEKS LATER

Aloen neatly bisected the undead Goblin, her blade clotheslining it and splitting its fragile rotted body apart as she stepped aside. Not bothering to wipe her sword off, she stepped over the body and forced a skeleton back with a jet of cold. 17th Company, her new command of mixed Aldmer and Goblins, charged past her into the former Goblin fortress as she hacked the skeleton apart. Two Goblins kicked down the coral-encrusted side door and she followed them through.

She found the first room nearly empty, its simple Goblin stone architecture unchanged unmodified by its Sload captors and its occupants limited to a few shambling zombies. The interior of the next, though, was appalling as expected. Goblins – and a few Aldmer – hung from the ceiling in various states of dissection; their organs and bones lay in neat patterns on gray tables nearby. A sickened Aloen gave the order to burn the bodies to her battlemages: better deny them a proper burial now than risk a necromancer putting them to bad use. She never missed the battle-trance as much as she did when clearing out Sload corpse laboratories.

After the mages had incinerated most of the bodies, gray mist flowed from nowhere into the remaining corpses and they climbed off their hooks and chains. They fell on her soldiers, Aldmer and Goblins alike struggling to contend with crawling body parts. She turned her back on them. In a corner, she spotted a sluglike Sload that had somehow packed itself under a table crawling as quietly as it could towards the nearest exit. Advancing quickly, she cut it off before it reached safety. Whatever their skills with magicka and necromancy, Sload were too corpulent and slow to fight much in person; she split its face open in seconds. The bodies attacking her soldiers went still.

Following the paths and hallways with the most noise echoing down them, Aloen and her soldiers soon found what was once a Goblin great hall, where a lord could throw feasts for his subjects or hold court and administer justice. Now it was empty, the individualistic Sload having removed any permanent signs of relative status and any remaining furniture smashed in the battle as 15 necromancers sent dozens of undead at 31st Company. Aloen spotted Muluc in the thick of the fighting, guarding wounded soldiers long enough for them to retreat before they died and rose again.

17th Company’s charge from behind caught the Sload off-guard; already overmatched by 31st Company, the undead melted away as Joint Army soldiers picked off their puppeteers one by one. When their enemies were down to three Sload, the one furthest back suddenly smashed the heads of the other two into each other hard enough to crack open their skulls and funneled magicka into them; their bodies and those of the dead nearby flowed together into an undead giant, a flesh atronach, which promptly laid into the soldiers around it. Aloen stepped forward, stabbed it in the side and shot a jet of fire into its face, and stepped back, drawing its attention. She and the atronach sparred, her sword barely fending off its bone claws and her offensive magic hardly injuring it. In a triumphant blow Aloen severed several fingers off one of its hands only to be clouted in the head by its other: she was scrambling back to prepare for its next strike when it imploded, nearly splattering her with putrid flesh. Muluc tugged their axe out of the Sload’s head and flashed her a smile.

The battle concluded that evening. After solemnly burying their dead, reanimated or not, the Joint Army cleaned out the fortress of broken furniture and horrific Sload experiments and set about re-fortifying it. During their cleanup they found the enemy’s larder still packed with decadent Sload food: the individualist and status-obsessed species tolerated nothing but the best in their rations. Eighth Division Command threw a feast.

Aloen sat next to Muluc on the rough wooden benches they’d scavenged out of the fortress’s dungeons, rejoicing and chatting as they roared through the perishable food they’d found. They’d both polished off the first course and had stood up together to get another when half the room fell silent. The trademark mist of necromancy, now purple instead of gray, flowed out of the shadows and into the sides of half the soldiers in the hallway. They launched at their comrades.

Muluc lunged at Aloen, their eyes wide and panicked. Their movements were clumsy, no doubt a side effect of possession and something Aloen thanked Auriel for; they fought without thought to self-preservation and threw themself at her with such force she could hear their bones and muscles creaking. Muluc shoved her side hard against a table and stared her in the eye as their arms snaked past hers at her throat.

And then they looked away. Even as she tried not to be choked out, Aloen noticed Muluc glancing repeatedly at something behind her. She flipped them around into the same table and spotted a particularly enormous Sload standing in front of a small, likely formerly hidden door holding out hands glowing with power. Aloen managed to kick Muluc away long enough to draw her dagger and throw it in one smooth motion.

It clinked against the wall pommel-first and fell to the ground. She had no idea how to throw a dagger. But it made the Sload flinch away long enough for her to throw a series of icicles at it, distracting it further and weakening its control. Muluc stilled, their body fighting against itself. In a few long strides she reached it and knocked it to the ground, pummeling it until it no longer moved.

All across the room soldiers sagged to the ground in pain or exhaustion. A group of still-conscious officers rushed over to her to take a look at the creature and soon dubbed it unconscious enough to be sedated and imprisoned for interrogation. She stood, panting, to the relieved cheers of a room full of soldiers spared having to kill their friends, then walked over to Muluc.

The Goblin tilted their head towards the Sload and grumbled, “Better luck next time.” Aloen laughed out loud.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Category change due to Foreshadowing!


End file.
